Out and about. I was thinking about the big event yesterday. Getting out for the first time in more than a year, not in an ambulance, or on a plane, but in a wheel chair, for a stroll. To the famous rose garden. There must have been a million things that Pádraig saw, felt, smelt, touched, tasted that he would have almost forgotten about.

What do you do when you get overwhelmed by your senses? What I do (though it doesn’t happen that often anymore:) is: I just give up or give in – whatever. ‘Resistance is futile’ in these instances. I suppose this is what happened to Pádraig yesterday: a big big bucket load of stuff thrown at him with no place to go. I got the feeling that the real effect of that ‘out and about’ excursion only started when he got back into his ‘own’ four walls. When he realised that the world outside actually did still exist and is just waiting for him to dive in and then get on top of it again.

If we forget for a moment about how Pádraig might have managed to deal with all of this and how he will deal with it over the next days, what was probably as important, if not even more important, as the excursion itself it was the fact that he could embark on it at all. Today, I had to go over some notes from the year just past. When I read about and then remembered how he was doing just some months ago, and compare that with him moving around the grounds of the hospital yesterday in his smart yellow (!) trousers and his even smarter blue vans (remember the pictures of the vans?), the magnitude of what happened yesterday became as clear as mud: whereas we all would have been really afraid of something happening to Pádraig getting out ‘into the wild’ then, yesterday no one was afraid. Yes, very very very nervous, but no afraid. It was, literally, a walk in the park.

Sebastian Hackel, Warum sie lacht (2011). Ich hab’ Hasen geseh’n, mitten in der Stadt…

Today’s Music Tip
Sebastian Hackel, Warum sie lacht (2011). Ich hab’ Hasen geseh’n, mitten in der Stadt…
What’s hot
Being completely overwhelmed by your senses
What’s cold
Not feeling. Anything.
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Mensch, das kannste dir wirklich nich’ vorstellen! Der glatte Wahn!